


knocking on heaven's door

by howyoubrewing



Series: commander and captain [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Ahsoka Tano Needs a Hug, CT-7567 | Rex Needs a Hug, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, Nightmares, Order 66, Post-Order 66, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Protective CT-7567 | Rex, Trauma, but interpret the relationship as you want, not intended to be a ship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-31
Updated: 2020-08-31
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:55:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26208268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/howyoubrewing/pseuds/howyoubrewing
Summary: It’s been a month since the day they lost everything but each other; hiding away on a backwater planet, they are falling apart.[a look at Rex and Ahsoka after Order 66, dealing with the trauma]
Relationships: CT-7567 | Rex/Ahsoka Tano
Series: commander and captain [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1931347
Comments: 2
Kudos: 63





	knocking on heaven's door

**Author's Note:**

> Me again! This is my first work written from Rex's POV, and it's really angsty and sad. I really feel like Rex and Ahsoka would've struggled to move on after Order 66, and this is my interpretation. Enjoy:)

She wasn’t sleeping again.

Rex sighs as he rolls over on his mat and his eyes fall on Ahsoka’s empty one across the room. He can’t be sure what woke him up, be it his years of battle training to rise at the smallest snap of a twig, or from a general sense that something wasn’t right. Lately he’s been so exhausted it’s all he can do to try and lecture her on going to bed before crashing himself; it’s been a month since the star destroyer crash, the day they lost everything except each other, and his body is still weary and his spirit tattered. He sleeps through most nights, wishing just a little bit that he won’t wake up in the morning. She opts for not sleeping at all, the faces of dead Jedi and clones swimming around in her head and refusing to let her rest.

When she does sleep, Rex wakes up to her screams, each one breaking a small piece of him as he watches. He’ll coax her out of the nightmare, try to ground her, hold her while she tries to calm her breathing, her shoulders shaking. It’s hard to watch, and he just wants her to be okay. _He_ isn’t okay, either, they both know that, but his grief manifests in different ways—the days where the heaviness will sit so heavy on his chest he can’t even speak, just sits there and stares out the window, numb. The pang that rattles through him whenever he thinks about his brothers and all they’ve lost. The nights he drinks his sorrows away until Ahsoka pulls the bottle from his hand. He shouted at her one time, about how it was all the Jedi’s fault and she should have been able to stop it sooner.

She excused herself to get some air, and he pretended not to know she was sitting outside the house, crying.

He apologized the next morning, and she gave a smile that didn’t reach her eyes and told him it was okay, she knew he didn’t mean it.

Only he knew she still blamed herself, that she agreed with him.

Now, in the dim light of the moon, he groans as he stands up and heads towards the door of the small, rundown house they’d found abandoned a few weeks ago. They had to keep moving constantly, avoiding the Empire, seeking refuge on tiny backwater planets and hoping they got lucky enough to avoid detection. It was a brutal survival game in a cruel galaxy that had stolen everything from them.

He creaks the door open and sees her, sitting on the edge of the small porch, staring out at the night. Her shoulders are both strained and slumped at the same time, as if she’s been beaten down but still cannot rest for the life of her. He knows she hears him, but she doesn’t move even as he sits next to her.

He chooses his words carefully, not wanting to make her defensive or withdraw from him. “When’s the last time you slept?” He asks softly.

Ahsoka bites her lip, her eyes darting lazily between the stars above. Once, Rex found the constellations of the sprawling universe beautiful. Now he struggles to find beauty in anything. “It’s been a few,” she relents, and he is surprised by the easy admission. Sometimes, when she is recovering from a nightmare, she is skittish and tense, growing angry and defensive at the slightest comment from him.

She’s been pushing herself far too hard this week, doing constant supply runs and spending hours upon hours mining through data and articles on the holopad. Trying, in vain, to find any more news of their brothers or the Jedi and what else happened. The new Empire, it seemed, did its best to hide the event and limit news to articles that glorified the new regime.

Rex glances over at her, noting the dark circles under her eyes that seem to be a permanent part of her features now. Her face is thinner than normal. Her eyes look bone weary.

“Ahsoka,” he commands gently. “Look at me.”

She does, finally, though she hesitates before she meets his gaze directly. “What?”

“You’re running yourself into the ground,” he states, reaching out and tracing his thumb over the bruise-colored ring under one of her sad blue eyes. She flinches just a little, bringing her hand up to his. It falls from her face, but this time she doesn’t pull away, linking her fingers through his.

“I know,” she whispers. “It’s the only thing I can do to not remember.”

At that he is silent, because he understands. He’s hypocritical, he knows, because it kills him to see her like this and he wants her to heal but he isn’t ready to take those steps either, to truly process through the grief and move on in a healthy way. How the hell do you move on from what happened?

“The nightmares won’t go away,” she admits, grimacing, looking wan in the moonlight. “If I stay awake I don’t have to see them as vividly. And working all day keeps my mind off it.”

“It’s been a month, Ahsoka. How…I don’t know what to do. You can’t… _we_ can’t go on like this forever.” Her hand is still in his, grounding them both, hers still slightly grimy from the repairs she worked on that day.

She takes a long breath. “I know, Rex. But I don’t know how.”

“Do you think talking about it would help?”

Ahsoka shoots him a look. “Like you talk about your problems? You just drink.”

He bites his tongue before he says anything too harsh; he knows she’s right. “I mean we _both_ need to, I think. If we just—”

“No.” She says flatly, cutting him off. “I can’t.”

“Soka—”

“It’s different, okay?” She bursts out, and he can tell he’s set something off inside. “Nothing that happened was your fault, Rex. There are so many things _I_ could have done to stop it, so many more I could have saved, especially if I didn’t let Maul out—”

“Ahsoka…”

“I still don’t know what happened to An—the Jedi, and everyone else, and I’ll never see them again, and we’re fugitives and _how long before they find us_? It can’t be long, they’re always right behind us—”

“ _Soka._ ” He cuts through her rapid breathing as she spirals, and she looks at him desperately as if remembering he’s there. She’s trying to calm down, mind going a million miles a second.

“They’re gone,” she whispers, her voice breaking. “Everyone’s gone.”

“I know,” he tells her, aching, the same phantom pains that ricochet through him whenever they talk about their lost brothers. She leans into his shoulder and he pulls her close, arms around her, pretending he doesn’t feel how thin she’s grown. He can feel her shaking with sobs but no noise comes out.

Rex holds her tight, as if they can hold each other together if they try hard enough. This routine is familiar to them, now, when one of them is close to breaking. They’ve found that if they lean in close, inhaling and exhaling together, drowning out the ghosts of their past, it makes the night a bit more bearable.

It could be hours that pass, Rex doesn’t know, but he pulls away carefully, hand on her arm, hoping to whatever being was out there that he could force her to get some sleep. “Let’s get back to bed, huh?”

Her eyes betray some of her anxiety about it, but to his surprise she nods. Quite possibly she’s hit a point of sleep deprivation where she’s too tired to argue. Rex helps her up and inside the house, where they go silently to their respective cots. He’s practically dozing off before he’s even in bed, marveling how the trauma has such ironically opposite effects on them.

Maybe that’s why he doesn’t hear Ahsoka’s footsteps until they are next to him; wordlessly, she climbs in bed next to him, wrapping her own blanket around her snugly, her back against his. He turns to look at her, mildly surprised. Rarely does she seek comfort from him intentionally.

Ahsoka looks back at him, her face tragically tired and sad all at the same time, silently asking if it was okay. She almost looks afraid of what he’ll say; he knows she hates looking weak and the conversation on the porch likely damaged her already thin-strung pride.

The softest of smiles tugs at his mouth at the show of trust from her. Instead of saying anything, he puts an arm around her protectively. Like he can ward her nightmares away.

“Night, ‘Soka,” he whispers, and a minute later he hears her breathing slow. It’s an enormous relief to him. The feeling of her inhaling and exhaling, finally resting, lightens the weight on his shoulders a bit.

He doesn’t know what comes next. He doesn’t know how long they’ll survive, or even if they can stay together indeterminately. But his Commander is going to be alright, and maybe he will be too.

He says a prayer, to the Force or whatever is out there. Thanking them that on the day he lost everything, he didn’t lose her too.


End file.
